Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Following on from my colleague's contribution, one of the biggest problems existing in the administration of this State is our glacial bureaucratic system. Anybody outside this Chamber will tell us that any time constituents try to do something right by their families, communities and the State, they find that they run into a bureaucratic wall when they deal with the State. The State is slow and cumbersome in dealing with issues.

I will give some examples. Some 70,000 people applied to the Be on Call for Ireland campaign to help during the Covid-19 crisis. Of those, only 400 were ever employed by the HSE. Equally, thousands of families have provided homes for Ukrainian refugees to stay in, but 85% of those homes have still not been activated today. When a job is given to this Government or to the upper echelons of the public service to deliver upon, the outcome is that it does not get delivered upon, it takes forever to do or it is completely rolled up in red tape and bureaucracy. The rest of Ireland gets on with executing its work efficiently because it has no choice but to do so. If that does not happen, the costs will come from the pockets of those involved. This State, however, takes forever to do anything because it can afford to do so as it is the taxpayers who are paying.

For me, the frustration around this issue stems from the fact that the Government has been aware of many of these problems for a long time, but it has failed to act on them. The issue that really jumps out at me is the microgeneration of electricity. The North of Ireland started a process 15 years ago of allowing people to put solar panels on their roofs, erect small-scale wind turbines and undertake biodigestion projects. Here we are this week, and correct me if I am wrong, and householders are just getting a tariff for the microgeneration of electricity. We are the last country in Europe to do it. Another example of how slow we are to do any reasonable job is that the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, met with other European energy ministers last week concerning the issue of offshore energy. He spoke about the seriousness of this issue. In 20 years, this State has seen seven wind turbines built offshore. Consider all the greenwashing photographs produced and all the glossy prospectuses and reports written, and this has been the output in 20 years. The endeavour has been disastrously, dangerously and expensively slow for the people of this country.

Then there is the issue of ideology. The first aspect in this regard concerns elements of the green ideology. I am an environmentalist and I believe strongly that we must protect society, but we must also take a common-sense approach to doing it. Being the only country without a gas reserve is dangerous and this is the direct result of this Government's policy. It leaves us as the country which is the most exposed in Europe to changes in the supply and prices of energy now, and this is the fault of the Government. The other aspect of this is the Government's instinct to blame the EU or at least to bow to it regarding fixing these issues. Therefore, while we have been pushing for VAT to be reduced on fuel, literally since Christmas, the Government has kept saying that the EU would not allow that to be done. Yet we have now seen that Spain and Portugal have secured a VAT reduction in the cost of their fuels. When I raised the idea in recent months that we should decouple the price of electricity generated by non-gas means from that which is gas-generated, the response from the Government was to say we should wait for the EU to do it. Was that the response in Iberia? No. Spain and Portugal have got a derogation and have been allowed to decouple their prices. I hear politicians talk about how rotten it is for energy companies to be charging gas prices for non-gas generated electricity at a time of such crisis, and yet it is the Government's system that allows that to be done. The Government is sitting on its hands and waiting for someone else to do it again.

Turning to carbon tax, it is absolutely a sin for the Government to be raising carbon tax year-on-year at a time when nearly 50% of the population is living in fuel poverty. It does not make sense, it is unfair and punitive and it must stop.

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